Friday, May 19, 2017

Unnamed and uncredible news sources, right in your living room

Mike Cernovich posted on Medium today that he doesn't think Trump is handling the media situation very well. The gist of the article is: why is Trump spending so much time defending from the constant mainstream hit pieces when he could be going on the attack himself. His supporters don't follow the mainstream news anyway, so why does he even bother with them?
He's not wrong that Trump should be attacking more and defending less. But the notion that he could change the media narrative experienced by the segment of the society that aren't rabid Trump-hating lefties is not practical, for a very specific reason. Perhaps you've figured it out already from the title of this post.

If Trump starts ignoring the New York Times entirely, what will change? Cernovich is probably right that most Trump supporters are not regular readers of the NYT. Trump's Twitter account has more direct reach, I'd imagine. But what happens when they run a story? Look at the recent one where allegedly Comey wrote a memo saying bad things about Trump. The source for that story is a guy with a Twitter history of calling Trump supporters racists and saying they should be deported. Not exactly a solid source. So why does the story get so much traction? Is it because so many people have NYT subscriptions? No. Is it because so many visit their website? No. Is it because so many share their stories on social media? That's definitely a factor. But the big reason, the real reason their stories have so much impact, is because the TV networks cover them.

It hardly matters whether or not Trump supporters read liberal newspapers. The TV tells people what the news is. The TV sets the agenda. And the TV thinks that the New York Times and Washington Post are premier credible news organizations. If it weren't for the TV the newspapers would have practically no impact at all. But their stories get covered by the TV. Millions of Americans see the news and that becomes the big issue that everyone is talking about. It gets spread on social media, the radio people then have to talk about it, and soon everyone is talking about what the NYT wrote because the TV made it a story. It's not as easy as just saying Trump should get off the defensive. The problem with Big Narrative is that it's beamed into the retinas of millions of brain-dead zombies all over the country. That's a much bigger problem.

On another note my favorite pro-Trump online hangount, r/the_donald, has gone dark for the evening in protest of the admins' recent purging of top mods there. I decided I'd make the risky venture to Reddit's hub of liberal insanity and check out r/politics. Here's what I found (red texts are my edits).

Of the top ten posts, eight are links to articles where the headline is information attributed to an unnamed source. This is evidence of just how detached they've become. While r/politics may be a special place, it is fairly reflective of the liberal mainstream narrative where a torrent of Trump scandals is dominating the news cycle and is all unverified. It could be made up for all we know. So far no major scandals have been verified with any evidence and several have been shown to be false. The tax return nonsense got blown up by Rachel Maddow. The PissGate thing was a farce. The Russian thing is clearly conspiracy theory but it hasn't blown up on them yet. So what we have is a pattern of the media being wrong about Trump scandals, and yet the left is going nuts over scandal allegations brought by liberal mainstream media outlets citing source that are either unnamed or without credibility. This is not healthy. This is madness. Utter madness.

I agree with Cernovich that there are serious questions about how well Trump is handling all this but they simply pale in comparison to mass hallucination from the voting public . You don't worry whether you paid the electric bill when your house is on fire. You deal with the big problems. Trump's competence might be a problem, but it's not the big problem. The big problem is that we live in a democracy where half the citizens are brainwashed by the TV.

2 comments:

As an avid reader, I take notice of certain statistics. 70% of people get their information from other people or TV. 60% of High School graduates will never read another book again in their lives. 40% of College graduates will never read another book again in their lives. Good job education. Only 20% of Americans will buy at least One book a year. 50% will not finished that book. So your core readers are only about 10% of the population. I'm not too worried about the MSM. Just look at their bias during the election coverage, Trump still won and only 2% of people that voted when polled said that the MSM influenced their decision. The truth is that since the Alt-Right online started publishing their number of readers, the MSM has been shown to be a Paper Tiger.

60% never read another book? That is a disturbing statistic. Hopefully many of them are reading articles at least. I've been having trouble finishing books lately because I spend so much time reading/writing blog posts. Where is the alt-right publishing their numbers? The Audicious Epigone's most recent post (see sidebar) showed through Google Analytics that the alt-right is dominating searches, with Alex Jones ahead by a mile. John Rivers posts updates about traffic rankings and alt-right sites are doing well be still far behind the big boys.

I wouldn't underestimate the power of the MSM. Sure Trump won, but all that says is their influence wasn't enough to overcome his natural advantage. Imagine if they had reported fairly. He might have grabbed 80% of the vote. It's really hard to know what the MSM influence because there is no scientific way to measure. All we do know is that they can be beaten.